"William M. Gear - A Relic of the Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gear W Michael)

Well, he knew one thing the Jinxian didn't.
Little Mira rose fast, arc blue, a hole into hell. Mann remained where he was, an insignificant mote in the yellow vegetation below one of the spires Captain Kidd had remarked on last night. The spire was a good half mile high. An artifact that size would seem impossibly huge to any but an Earthman. The way it loomed over him made Mann uncomfortable. In shape it was a slender cone with a base three hundred feet across. The surface near the base was gray and smooth to touch, like polished granite.
The yellow vegetation was a thick, rolling carpet. It spread out around the spire in an uneven circle half a mile in diameter and dozens of feet deep. It rose about the base in a thick turtleneck collar. Close up, the stuff wasn't even discrete plants. It looked like a cross between moss and wool, dyed flagrant yellow.
It made a good hiding place. Not perfect, of course; a heat sensor would pick him out in a flash. He hadn't thought of that last night, and now it worried him. Should he get out, try to reach the sea?
The ship would certainly carry a heat sensor, but not a portable one. A portable heat sensor would be a weapon, a nighttime gunsight, and weapons of war had been illegal for some time in human space.
But the Puppet Master could have stopped elsewhere to get such impliments. Kzinti, for example.
Nonsense. Why would Captain Kidd have needed portable weapons with night gunsights? He certainly hadn't expected puppeteers to fight hand-to-hand! The stunners were mercy weapons; even a pirate would not dare kill a puppeteer, and Captain Kidd was no ordinary pirate.
All right. Radar? He need only burrow into the moss/wool. Sight search? Same answer. Radio? Mental note: Do not transmit anything.
Mental note? There was a dictaphone in his helmet. He used it after pulling the helmet out of the moss/wool around him.
Plying figures. Mann watched them for a long moment, trying to spot the Jinxian. There were only four, and he wasn't among them. The four were flying northwest of him, moving south. Mann ducked into the moss.
"Hello, Rich Mann."
The voice was low, contorted with fury. Mann felt the shock race through him, contracting every muscle with the fear of death. It came from behind him!
From his helmet.
"Hello, Rich Mann. Guess where I am?
He couldn't turn it off. Spacesuit helmet radios weren't built to be turned off: a standard safety factor. If one were fool enough to ignore safety, one could insert an "off" switch; but Mann had never felt the need.
"I'm in your ship, using your ship-to-suit radio circuit. That was a good trick you played last night. I didn't even know what a stage tree was till I looked it up in your library."
He'd just have to endure it. A pity he couldn't answer back.
"You killed four of my men and put five more in the autodoc tanks. Why'd you do it, Rich Mann? You must have known we weren't going to kill you. Why should we? There's no blood on our hands."
You lie, Mann thought at the radio. People die in a market crash. And the -ones who live are the ones who suffer. Do you know what it's like to be suddenly poor and not know how to live poor?
"I'll assume you want something, Rich Mann. All right. What? The money in my hold? That's ridiculous. You'd never get in. You want to turn us in for a reward? Fat chance. You've got no weapons. If we find you now, we'll kill you."
The four searchers passed far to the west, their headlamps spreading yellow light across the blue dusk. They were no danger to him now. A pity they and their fellows should have been involved in what amounted to a vendetta.
"The puppeteer planet, of course. The modern El Dorado. But you don't know where it is, do you? I wonder if I ought to give you a hint. Of course you'd never know whether I was telling the truth. . .
Did the Jinxian know how to live poor? Mann shuddered. The old memories came back only rarely; but when they came, they hurt. You have to learn not to buy luxuries before you've bought necessities. You can starve learning which is which. Necessities are food and a place to sleep, shoes and pants. Luxuries are tobacco, restaurants, fine shirts, throwing away a ruined meld while you're learning to cook, quitting a job you don't like. A union is a necessity. Boosterspice is a luxury.
The Jinxian wouldn't know about that. He'd bad the money to buy his own ship.
"Ask me politely, Rich Mann. Would you like to know where I found the puppeteer system?"
Mann had leased the Explorer on a college grant. It had been the latest step in a long climb upward. Before that
He was half his lifetime old when the crash came. Until then boosterspice had kept him as young as the ageless idle ones who were his friends and relatives. Overnight he was one of the hungry. A number of his partners in disaster had ridden their lift belts straight up into eternity; Richard Schultz-Mann had sold his for his final dose of boosterspice. Before he could afford boosterspice again, there were wrinkles in his forehead, the texture of his skin had, changed, his sex urge had decreased, strange white patches had appeared in his hair, there were twinges In his back. He still got them.
Yet always he had maintained his beard. With the white spike and the white streak it looked better than ever. After the boosterspice restored color to his hair, he dyed the patches back in again.
"Answer me, Rich Mann!"
Go ride a bandersnatch.
It was a draw. Captain Kidd couldn't entice him into answering, and Mann would never know the pirate's secret. If Kidd dropped his ship in the sea, Mann could show it to the police. At least that would be something.
Luckily Kidd couldn't move the Explorer. Otherwise he could take both ships half around the planet, leaving Mann stranded.
The four pirates were far to the south. Captain Kidd had apparently given up on the radio. There were water and food syrup in his helmet; Mann would not starve.
Where in blazes were the police? On the other side of the planet?
Stalemate.

Big Mira came as a timorous peeping Tom, poking its rim over the mountains like red smoke. The land brightened, taking on tinges of lavender against long, long navy blue shadows. The shadows shortened and became vague.
The morality of his position was beginning to bother Dr. Richard Mann.
In attacking the pirates, he had done his duty as a citizen. The pirates had sullied humanity's hard-won reputation for honesty. Mann had struck back.
But his motive? Fear had been two parts of that motive. First, the fear that Captain Kidd might decide to shut his mouth. Second, the fear of being poor.
That fear had been with him for some time.
Write a book and make a fortune! It looked good on paper. The thirty-light-year sphere of human space contained nearly fifty billion readers. Persuade one percent of them to shell out half a star each for a disposable tape, and your four-percent royalties became twenty million stars. But most books nowadays were flops. You had to scream very loud nowadays to get the attention of even ten billion readers. Others were trying to drown you out.
Before Captain Kidd, that had been Richard SchultzMann's sole hope of success.
He'd behaved within the law. Captain Kidd couldn't make that claim; but Captain Kidd hadn't killed anybody.
Mann sighed. He'd had no choice. His major motive was honor, and that motive still held.
He moved restlessly in his nest of damp moss/wool. The day was heating up, and his suit's temperature control would not work with half a suit. What was that?
It was the Puppet Master, moving effortlessly toward him on its lifters. The Jinxian must have decided to get it under water before the human law arrived.
...Or had he?
Mann adjusted his lift motor until he was just short of weightless, then moved cautiously around the spire. He saw the four pirates moving to intersect the Puppet Master. They'd see him if he left the spire. But if he stayed, those infrared detectors ... He'd have to chance it.
The suit's padded shoulders gouged his armpits as he streaked toward the second spire. He stopped in midair over the moss and dropped, burrowed in it. The pirates didn't swerve.